All Your Messages Have Been Erased

All Your Messages Have Been Erased, by Vivian Shipley, 2010, Louisiana Literature Press, 128 pp., paper, $14.95, ISBN: 978-0-945083-28-3 (paper), 978-0-945083-27-6 (cloth)

For a long time I found it difficult to take opera seriously, despite the music and the quality of singing. In the exaggerations and excesses, I saw only falsity whose justification for existing was to be a catalyst for a theatrical production that presented drama whose roots seemed rarely to be in life as we recognize it on the earthly plane. Eventually I changed my mind; I think the credit goes to Puccini. Yes, I realized that everything about an opera is artificial except the emotions an opera conveys. Having overcome my bias, I have gone on to enjoy the moments, however unbelievable or overwrought, in which a hero or heroine rises – onstage – above all limitations. My conversion notwithstanding, I can still understand the reservations over stretching credibility in order to create art. The dramatic monologue in poetry runs the same risks as opera, in that the poet gives voice to another person, often compressing long term experience into a few lines that may or may not strike us as credible. When poems are written in a voice not the poet’s, the reader ought to be able to imagine the speaker through the script that has been written, and this is always a potential stumbling point.

In her newest book, Vivian Shipley moves through time and space to invoke the voices of, including others, Mary Shelley, Winifred Benham (accused of being a witch in 1697 Connecticut), and Adolf Hitler’s sister. My first questions when faced with such a cast are about why these characters have been chosen. Certainly in our age it is sadly appropriate and necessary to examine lives spent close to misdirected power or else falling victim to religious mania. What we most obviously gain from such a collection is the information the poems contain about specific events as we take advantage of the author’s own researches and reading. a great example of history coming to life with a personal voice comes in "Number Fifty-two: Winifred Benham, Hartford, Connecticut, October 7, 1697”with such lines as;

Pulled down to blackness, encircled by the hand of God,
three minutes would prove my innocence. My accusers
rehearsed their lines: John Moss, 15, only grandson
of Wallingford’s commissioner and Elizabeth Lathrop,
19, daughter of the New London Court judge, testified
I had frequently and sorely afflicted parts of their bodies

too private for inspection.

Shipley’s expansive style lends itself well to this interweaving of the factual and dramatic. The original events would, in themselves, have provided enough to rattle us awake while imagining the speaker’s voice adds an emotional layer that is easily omitted in a dry history. Surely too, the poet will find a degree of liberation to speak from another’s experience and thereby reach a kind of imagery that wouldn’t occur in dealing strictly with the here and now. Toward the end of this same poem we find;

in Connecticut, but the sight of a cormorant, shining
like a black angel struggling to fly, will keep alive
the cry of a believer fallen.

The hurdles one must overcome to make this genre work include presenting information as an integral part of the poem and not simply tell it with line breaks. For the most part, the poems here succeed, although at times a good idea doesn’t translate so easily into a lyric. The "SISTER”in the sequence of that name is Hitler’s. My new operatic leanings make a moment like this (in "At Night Paula Hitler Thinks of Her Brother”) all the more appealing:

Grass greened our knees, but did not leave

a stain like my love for my brother does,
blood red, a candle dripping in my heart.

For the most part, "SISTER” explores the life a demon from an unexpected standpoint. (I am reminded of the Andre Heller’s documentary film "Blind Spot” in which he interviews Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge.) The transmission of information intended for the reader is at times directed at Hitler himself, and once in a while the poetic quality flags a little. For instance:

After the interesting literary array of characters in the first section (Holly Stevens, editing her father, Wallace’s work, Lucia Joyce . . . ), I found the second group’s opener, "Ode to Virginia Tech, Blackburg: April 16, 2007,” to take off with a special energy, perhaps fuelled by the fact of its inspiration being recent, as it explores an individual’s terrible descent into violence. The book does shift again at its final section, where the arias give way to a more personal tone. In "Missing My Mother’s Last Breath” the emotion comes from mundane rather than mythological sources, such as "my glasses forgotten,/I am three minutes too late.” It is Vivian Shipley who speaks, openly, and reflectively in "Orphan.”

I left Kentucky, Methodist church revivals, pledges
not to drink alcohol and called Connecticut home.
Today I am free of all that. Yet, why am I bothered so
by the erratic mess my mother made with her box

of Crayolas?

We may seek the emotional lives of others in a theatrical drama, but Vivian Shipley never overlooks the significance of small things, even in the light of historical events.